User Reviews

Overall Rating:

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Submitted by
Dawn
a Audio Enthusiast

Date Reviewed: October 19, 2011

Bottom Line:

I just purchased a pair of Wharfedale Valdus 500SE speakers, hooked them up this morning and they sound awesome! I paid $30 for the pair and I am thrilled that they look and sound great! Perhaps I just got lucky. All I know is that for my intended use of the speakers they will out-perform the speakers that I had. I am a 40 + year old woman who LOVES alternative, house, rock Dub-step etc....music and these Wharfedale speakers perform nicely. I don't care about the schematics or comparisons as long as they suit my needs, I will be happy!

I DONT RECOMMEND DOING THIS AT ALL
I picked up 2 pair of vladus 500's from an auction about 4 months ago in prep for a Haunted house,and paid about $150 New Zealand. and I found out why when I pulled them out of storage to check them over. I wired them up to a small (I think 85Watts per channel) 2 channel amp, to see if they would even go and to my surprise they did. But they didnt seem very loud, It wasnt until I looked at the cones and saw that the foams had rotted away. Being in Halloween mode and not having time (or wanting to spend money on them) , (some of you may want to stop reading from this point) I pulled out the Hot Glue gun and put as tidy a bead I could of Hot Glue around the 10 of the 12 drivers and let it cool. Low and behold it worked I cranked up the volume slowly all the way to max and they have so far hung together, and they have been thrashed for the last week and a half with no signs of them giving up yet.
For a set of speakers that were manufactured in about 1995 to be hot glued back together and have them preform better than most new speakers is a testament to how well they were engineered in the first place. Pity I dont have the time to fix them properly But I will be getting a new set of VARDUS400B,s as soon as the situation presents

I bought the speakers 2nd hand after reading their past reviews from this website. Its now cosidered as pre-hestoric technology but hey, they sounds brand new. To me, how your speaker sounds really depends on their partners - source, pre/pro, amps, cables, etc. All these will have a huge impact on the sounds the speakers produce. Specifically for valdus 500, u need to drive them really hard to get optimum results - which basically means powerful amps, at least 150wpc. I used a rotel (bridge mode) with 200wpc and these speakers delivers everything they got. Solid & punchy bass, sweet mids and clear highs. The more you crank the volume the better it gets and it can handle almost any type of music. It is suitable for hometheather too but u need a subwoofer to compliment with that.

What I like the most about these speakers are the natural sound they produce & of course the powerful punch they deliver are so unbelievably realistic - especially if u focus on the bass drum. In fact wharfedale speakers are famous in producing natural sounds - valdus 500 is one of them. I consider myself as a musician and are used to the sounds of real musical instruments. I would say that these speakers are capable of generating 80% accuracy on the realistic sounds of the instruments - which is a good score in my opinion.

However, I would say that these speakers are not meant for audiophile listeners because the level of accuracy does not meet audiophile standards. I'm gonna be keeping this pair for a while before my budget would allow me to acquire a pair of B&W nautilus speakers.

i managed to purchase these as well as a pair of yamaha sn 100's for 450.00. i am a advid klipsch fan i have a matched pair of heresy's for the rear a klipsch center channel and a 12 inch klipsch kicker. and i run a denon avr 2802 receiver 90 x7 watts.the guy needed the money and i needed new fronts i figured 4 speakers for 450.00 i cant go wrong .well these speakers are doing just fine they seem to get along well with all my klipsch i little weak on the bass but hey thats what my 12 inch kicker is for. the highs and mids are pretty good. i little to much plastic for me but ill get used to it as long as they stay sounding good

I'm no HiFi expert, but they certainly sound terrific. Very loud. Lots of bass.

I had only had them for a few months when one of the tweeters stopped working, and my amp only puts out 70W RMS per channel so I couldn't see how I would have damaged them. I hadn't dropped or bumped it either.

I assumed I'd need a new tweeter, but it turned out the wire to the tweeter had become loose!